Greenspace: Containerizing your garden

Saturday

The No. 1 reason to containerize is space. Lot sizes now are small, often with big front yards and miniature back yards. In our older areas, once sunny gardens now are tree shaded.

We spend a lot of time catching up to California. The nation’s container-garden revolution started there 60 years ago, only recently catching fire elsewhere.

California is hardly the lush paradise of Hollywood. A lot of it is nearly desert, arable only in one or two seasons. Containers with their water economy make a lot of sense there.

The No. 1 reason to containerize is space. Lot sizes now are small, often with big front yards and miniature back yards. In our older areas, once sunny gardens now are tree shaded.

At my house, 25 years ago I had a large vegetable garden out back. Now that the trees have grown, that’s shaded for most of the day. It no longer will grow a tomato.

We love our trees more than our tomatoes, but it would be nice to have both. This season, I decided to turn my driveway into a vegetable garden. It gets the most sun. Why waste it on something like parking cars.

I still have one small, sunny space in the yard. That became my test comparison.

I planted the same peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes there and in containers on the drive. The plants on the drive are four times larger than in the soil.

I like the convenience. I can place plants solely on amount of sunlight. The pavement actually helps things by holding the heat at night.

I never enjoyed asphalt anyway. It’s nice to have something green out there.